proposal: 'jar:fsdeploy' and standard inclusion of source jars.

[Eelco Hillenius <ee...@topicus.nl>]

I would like to propose the following:

1. - An alternative for jar:deploy that deploys (or copies) the jar to
another filesystem (e.g. a shared directory on a file server). I attached
the implementation as a patch. To use it the command/ goal 'maven fs:deploy'
should be used, together with the variable: 'maven.repo.central.fileserver'
that should point to a valid directory.

My collegues and I just adopted Maven last week for several of our projects
and intend to make it our standard way of defining our projects. We set up a
repository on a shared windows server. We do not want to set up ssh on the
shared server at this stage though, which is the reason we needed another
deploy mechanism.

2. - The inclusion of source jars in the default jar handling. For most of
the jars we include for a project, we couple their sources in the IDE (which
is Eclipse for us), so that we can step through the whole code if we want
to. It would great to have the following ...
    a. whenever a jar is build, a source jar is build as wel. So, when
issuing 'maven jar' not only mylib-1.0.1.jar is created but also
mylib-1.0.1-src.jar is created.
    b. jar:deploy should include the -src jar as well.
    c. some standard way of coupling the -src jars to the jar dependencies.
Maybe something like:
        <dependency>
            <id>commons-beanutils</id>
            <version>1.5</version>
            <url>http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/beanutils/</url>
            <properties>
                <usesrcjar>true</usesrcjar>
            </properties>
        </dependency>
        ,or - maybe even better - try for each resource to get a
corresponding {name}-{version}-src.jar (possibly overidden by tag <srcjar>).
In the latter case: if the         source jar is not found the goal does not
fail.
    d. plugins like the eclipse plugin could not only generate the classpath
entries sec, but also could generate the source entries and couple the jars
and src jars.

I've seen comments on the list from other people concerning the issue of
coupling sources to jars in their IDE's as well, so I think it would be a
very welcome addition to Maven for a lot of people. What do you all think?

Eelco Hillenius